Posts about Howard_Stern

I had the great pleasure last night to watch one of my favorite interviewers on one of my favorite shows, live in New York. Jian Ghomeshi [except for an excess H it sounds like it’s spelled] is the host of the CBC’s Q, which I’ve listened to for years. You can — no, should — listen to him online, on Sirius (channel 159), or on some smart public-radio stations like WNYC, which have started carrying him.

Ghomeshi runs a radio variety show, but not like one of the late-night TV shows in America. It’s a smart variety show. It doesn’t try to be funny or hip but is both. Ghomeshi’s opening monologue is a written essay/soliloquy/riff that sets the pace for the show; it says, “keep up now.” He gets great musical bookings and gives them time. He knows how to speak with them because he was a rock musician himself. But the heart of the show is his long-form interviews with musicians, authors, actors, and divas; he’s comfortable with them all.

Last night I was thinking about my favorite interviewers: Howard Stern, Jian Ghomeshi, and WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, each live and uncut. And I started to understand, I think, what makes them great. They treat interviews like music.

That’s not my thought. At the after-party — an understated Canadian affair — I was talking with an American public-radio executive who was also a musician and a jazz producer and he said he saw Ghomeshi’s experience as a musician play out in his interviews: playing over the occasional wrong note, going with the flow of someone else’s solo. When Jian arrived later he, too, talked about getting into the right rhythm with a guest. It is musical, he said.

Right. In the car on the way home, I listened to a replay of Stern’s hour-and-a-half interview with James Franco this week. When I first heard the start of it, live, I thought Stern was being slightly ADD. He’d get Franco to go down a path; Franco would get ready to launch into a story; Stern would get distracted by a squirrel or perhaps he’d worry that Franco would spend too long and he’d deflect him to another subject; there was a bit of Mexican jumping bean to it. But last night I heard the rest of the interview and it was amazing. They got into sync. They were comfortable and out of that comfort came the surprising candor Stern can get even from jaded, over-interviewed stars. He truly is a genius at it. The real advantage of Sirius is not that he can say “fuck” but that he has the time, uninterrupted, to find that rhythm.

Ghomeshi has the similar advantage of being on public radio in Canada with two hours to devote to his guests. I’ve had the privilege of being on the show a few times. It’s shocking to my American media biorhythms to find myself in an interview or debate that doesn’t end in 2:30 — a race to the finish of the sound bite — but instead can turn into a real discussion. That contrast was apparent last night in Q’s media panel — one of my favorite parts of his week, but this time with American guests: The New York Times’ David Carr, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, and right-wing CNNer Will Cain. Though Goodman decried the sound bite, the truth is that they were all trained to recite theirs in sparse minutes while Ghomeshi was trying to get them to actually arrive at least at a clear statement of disagreement about gun control. Good luck with that. Cain wouldn’t play. Still, it made for fascinating radio/video/theater.

His other interviews each had their own cadences. Cyndi Lauper, who is approaching diva status, talked about her Broadway show with Harvey Fierstein, Kinky Boots, and about her childhood and, God help us, the Dalai Lama. Ghomeshi let her go. At his usual pace, with fewer guests than he had on stage last night, the interview would have gone on longer but the clock got in the way. Still, leaving us wanting more is not a bad thing.

Alan Alda tried to show Ghomeshi who was boss (“You grew up in the Bronx,” said Ghomeshi. “No I didn’t but I can tell you’re a Wikipedia reader,” said Alda) but that turned into a pleasant chat about the impact of M*A*S*H and about science (Alda is challenging scientists to define a flame and time so 11-year-olds could understand).

Vampire Weekend played three songs, a luxury the crowd enjoyed. Actually, they played four, asking to come back after the taping was done to rerecord their first. That provided a post facto punch line; now I understood the sly grins they shared when Ghomeshi — obviously aware of the redo that was coming up — asked Ezra Koenig and Rostam Batmanglij whether they were perfectionists.

The highlight of the night for me was David Cross talking about the return of Arrested Development. At the party, Ghomeshi said the two of them had hit that certain rhythm; watch how they did it at the start of the second hour, below. Cross began, like Alda, testing the line. He asked Jian whether he was that guy who had that interview — famously strange — with Billy Bob Thornton. “He was just such an insufferable prick,” Cross said. “We’re not going to replay that now, are we?” Ghomeshi asked. That could have gone either way. But then Ghomeshi exhibited real knowledge of Cross; he’d seen his stand-up act and knew his shows and had insightful questions and Cross responded with both candor and great comic timing. In only a moment, they became an act together.

After the show, I talked with a bunch of public-radio people and asked whether there was anyone in the U.S. market like Ghomeshi. They couldn’t think of anyone. Neither can I. We’re lucky we get to listen here. I asked his producers what the Canadian reaction was to Ghomeshi’s growing American fan base — did they wonder why he needed us. No, they said, but Canadians did worry that the show would become — like surely too much else from their perspective — too American. I don’t think that can happen. The acts and the subjects are shared. The attitude isn’t.

Ghomeshi is quite Canadian. He embodies what I like about the place — and why I indeed almost moved there three times (I am the rare Canadophile, but that’s another story). The Venn diagram of his and Canadian’s characteristics has many overlaps: calm, charming, self-deprecating, witty, easy, smart, never too hip, quite comfortable…. Hear for yourself.

I have just one wish: that Sirius and public-radio stations here would give his Q’s full two hours. We’re almost as smart and patient and interested as Canadians. Really.

This morning in an otherwise carefully bleeped-and-blurred segment, the CBS Early Show reported on the #fuckyouwashington hashtag. At the end, on my Mac screen, they showed the Trendsmap display of the hashtag popping up, like Howard Beale’s windows, across America:

For a flash, you can see the word “fuck” Indeed, you can see it often. This is the very definition of a fleeting expletive.

Will the FCC and its henchmen dare to file a complaint? Do they have a sufficient sense of irony to stop them?

I have fought against the FCC and its unconstitutional efforts to restrict free speech. Here is a report on a FOIA I filed that showed that the FCC levied its then-largest fine ever on the basis of only three complaints (nevermind the damned spam links in the archive). When I testified at the FCC about the future of news, I began with the word “Bababooey” as a reminder that the FCC had chilled Howard Stern’s speech — his political speech — with its harassment and fines. I defend the word “bullshit” as political speech — and here will defend “fuck” as political speech as well.

Even as the Supreme Court reviews the FCC’s fleeting expletives doctrine, will it have the balls to go prosecute one more?

“The internet needs you,” I said to Howard Stern when I called into the show this morning as he was ranting about his contract negotiations with Sirius XM and the possibility that he could take his show and more to the net.

Do it, Howard.

“You made satellite radio,” I told him. “You will make the internet.” For Stern is the one media entity who can absolutely, positively get people to pay online — even me, the alleged opponent of all things paid. Today I pay $12 a month for Stern — more, actually, with my internet account and my wife’s and son’s cars. Stern is talking about charging $5 a month and for that we’d get his radio show plus his TV shows plus much more, even music — and no advertising (“why should I hire a sales force?” he asked).

Sold.

Why the hell would I pay for Howard Stern and not pay for news? Because Howard is unique. News isn’t. There’s no end of potential competition for any news provider and its unique value expires in seconds. Not so Howard. Arianna Huffington was wrong when she says that people will pay for business news and porn. There’s no need to pay for porn because there’s no scarcity of people who will strip and shtupp in front of a webcam. But there’s only one Howard.

I wrote about Howard’s potential internet empire here. Fellow Howard fan Doc Searls wrote about the potential here. Way back in 2005, I wrote an open letter to Sirius’ Mel Karmazin urging him to embrace the internet and see satellite as just as transitional delivery mechanism for his valuable content (ignore the fucking spam links on the post). He didn’t listen. Apparently, he’s not listening to Howard, either.

Fine. Even though I’m a Sirius shareholder and even though his departure would lead to a plummet in the stock price (from 2¢ to 1¢), I want him to leave because he will turn the internet into a credible, sustainable, mass entertainment medium. The delivery’s tricky but that will be fixed quickly as we carry connected devices all the time, everywhere: our phones, computers, TVs, cars, tablets, and devices we can’t imagine will all be connected (if the phone companies don’t fuck it up). The critical last six inches for Stern are not his penis but the means by which his show gets from my phone to my car speakers. But it’ll be cheaper to install a bluetooth transmitter than a Sirius radio. If we millions of Stern fans went to the trouble of subscribing to and installing Sirius, we’ll do it with something even easier that gives us the entire internet all the time.

For Stern, the economics have to be extremely tempting. He should not work for a company. (Howard: Don’t get sucked into signing on with another employer!) He should be the company. He can charge us less than half what we pay now. He can build the infrastructure for next to nothing (as he said today, he can build a studio — big deal). All he needs is a billing mechanism (Paypal?) and a bandwidth provider (Akamai?). He won’t need to market; he already is viral. And he gets to keep the profits. Sweet.

For us, we get to listen to Stern whenever and wherever we want. (Howard: Please let us listen to repeats on our own schedule, on demand!) We pay less and don’t suffer through ads for itchy-ball cures.

For the internet, we get to prove to unique entertainers everywhere that they can cut out the middlemen — networks, studios, all that — and create valuable relationships directly with their fans, getting much richer in the process. And that, in turn, forces entertainers, studios, networks, and cable companies to sell us entertainment a la carte, so I can stop paying for the damned 95% of my channels I never watch.

What’s not to love?

Do it, Howard. Leave old technology. Build the next medium, our medium. To hell with all the old media companies that have screwed you and us all these years. This is real freedom.

Bravo. The Court of Appeals has struck down the FCC’s indecency rule — specifically, its fines for “fleeting expletives” — as “unconstitutionally vague.”

No shit.

Fox is the official victor here. The other networks also win. But we all win whenever the First Amendment does.

The Appeals Court, to its credit, notes how much media and the country have changed since George Carlin first uttered his seven dirty words on radio and the Supreme Court blushed. Says the appeals panel:

The Networks argue that the world has changed since Pacifica and the reasons underlying the decision are no longer valid. Indeed, we face a media landscape that would have been almost unrecognizable in 1978. Cable television was still in its infancy. The Internet was a project run out of the Department of Defense with several hundred users. Not only did Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter not exist, but their founders were either still in diapers or not yet conceived. In this environment, broadcast television undoubtedly possessed lives of all Americans.”

The same cannot be said today. The past thirty years has seen an explosion of media sources, and broadcast television has become only one voice in the chorus. Cable television is almost as pervasive as broadcast – almost 87 percent of households subscribe to a cable or
satellite service – and most viewers can alternate between broadcast and non-broadcast channels with a click of their remote control. The
internet, too, has become omnipresent, offering access to everything from viral videos to feature films and, yes, even broadcast television programs. As the FCC itself acknowledges, “[c]hildren today live in a media environment that is dramatically different from the one in which their parents and grandparents grew up decades ago.”

Nonetheless, the Supreme Court’s doctrine in the Carlin decision stands. But this court is not reinterpreting that rule of law. Instead it finds that the FCC’s police is “impermissibly vague.” That is: “A law or regulation is impermissibly vague if it does not ‘give the person of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited.'” And the First Amendment requires extra attention to protection from such vagueness. The court said:

We agree with the Networks that the indecency policy is impermissibly vague. The first
problem arises in the FCC’s determination as to which words or expressions are patently offensive. For instance, while the FCC concluded that “bullshit” in a “NYPD Blue” episode was patently offensive, it concluded that “dick” and “dickhead” were not. Other expletives such as “pissed off,” up yours,” “kiss my ass,” and “wiping his ass” were also not found to be patently offensive…. Thus, the word “bullshit” is indecent because it is “vulgar, graphic and explicit” while the words “dickhead” was not indecent because it was “not sufficiently vulgar, explicit, or graphic.” This hardly gives broadcasters notice of how the Commission will apply the factors in the future. The English language is rife with creative ways of depicting sexual or excretory organs or activities, and even if the FCC were able to provide a conew offensive and indecent words are invented every day….

The same vagueness problems plague the FCC’s presumptive prohibition on the words “fuck” and “shit” and the exceptions thereto. Under the FCC’s current policy, all variants of these two words are indecent unless one of two exceptions apply. The first is the “bona fide news” exception, which the FCC has failed to explain except to say that it is not absolute. The second is the artistic necessity exception, in which fleeting expletives are permissible if they are “demonstrably essential to the nature of an artistic or educational work or essential to informing viewers on a matter of public importance.”

That’s how Saving Private Ryan got away with “fuck” and “shit” while on The Blues, they were dirty. In other words: when white people say them, the words are clean, but not when black people say them. Says the court: “The FCC created these exceptions because it words would raise grave First Amendment concerns.” Yup.

The policy may maximize the amount of speech that the FCC can prohibit, but it results in a standard that even the FCC cannot articulate or apply consistently. Thus, it found the use of the word “bullshitter” on CBS’s The Early Show to be “shocking and gratuitous” because it occurred “during a morning television interview,” before reversing itself because the broadcast was a “bona fide news interview.” In other words, the FCC reached diametrically opposite conclusions at different stages of the proceedings for precisely the same reason – that the word “bullshitter” was uttered during a news program. And when Judge Leval asked during oral argument if a program aboutthe dangers of pre-marital sex designed for teenagers would be permitted, the most that the FCC’s lawyer could say was “I suspect it would.” With millions of dollarAmendment values at stake, “I suspect” is simply not good enough.

Importantly, the court recognizes that the FCC has chilled speech. CBS affiliates would not air a 9/11 documentary because it contained curse words — and I can’t imagine a better cause for them. As I argued in this column, bullshit is political speech. Sandra Loh was fired from an NPR station because she said a bad word. “Broadcasters,” the court says, “may well decide not to invite controversial guests on to t heir programs for fear that an unexpected fleeting expletive will result in fines.” A station did not air Pat Tillman’s funeral because of family members’ grief and language. Fix didn’t air a repeat of a That ’70s Show episode — a Kaiser Family Foundation award winner — that dealt with masturbation. They were no longer masters of their domain.

Sex and the magnetic power of sexual attraction are surely among the most predominant themes in the study of humanity since the Trojan War. The digestive system and excretion are also important areas of human attention. By prohibiting all “patently offensive” references to sex, sexual organs, and excretion without giving adequate guidance as to what “patently offensive” means, the FCC effectively chills speech, because broadcasters have no way of knowing what the FCC will find offensive. To place any discussion topics at the broadcaster’s peril has the effect of promoting wide self-censorship material which should be completely protected under the First Amendment.

All is not won. The Appeals Court says the FCC could create constitutional policy — this just isn’t it. And this could return to the Supreme Court. But for now, let’s all say a celebratory “BULLSHIT.”

Yesterday’s Stern show appearance came because on This Week in Google, we’d made fun of Howard Stern for using Lotus Notes still and Howard’s geek guru, Jeff Schick of IBM, rose up in protest and invited me in to see how the show uses it.

Start with Stern technology: Schick said they they digitize everything — every show, every bit of audio, every press clipping, even everything sent into the show. They scan all the fan mail. They scan dildoes. This adds up to 100 terabytes of data. That’s stored at Howard’s office in New York (outside Sirius) — which is in addition to the audio that’s stored, of course, at Sirius (and backed up in New Jersey), and in addition to the video archives. Howard’s own 100tb is backed up at Howard’s beach house. Howard’s office has a T1 and business-class cable and a direct link to Howard’s apartment, which also has business-class cable, like his beach house (which has CAT5 cable in every all and multiple wi-fi networks for Howard and guests). Serious shit.

On air, I asked Howard whether all this means that fans will someday have access to it. He said yes. I don’t want to read too much into that but I keep hoping that if Stern leaves satellite, he’ll start an internet empire.

I think the economics work: Stern has proven, thanks to his move to Sirius, that his fans, by the millions, will pay $12 a month to hear him. He can charge less online and make more because he’d own it entirely and his cost structure — technology, programming, marketing — would be far less than Sirius’.

The technology isn’t quite there but it will be soon. We fans need to be able to listen to Stern in our cars in the morning. We need to able to listen to the internet. That is possible today. On the way to the show yesterday, I listened to it on my iPhone. (Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone in case Sirius or Apple cuts it off. But it’s legit; I pay for internet access and use my internet password to get access on the phone.) We can listen to shows we buy on our iPods (but it’s better live). I have no doubt the technology will arrive and soon — but soon enough for the end of Stern’s contract in December? We’ll see.

By the way, I also got to see what they’re talking about on the Stern show when they say “Gary Preview Page 2, second column, bottom, in yellow….” It’s Prophet, the Sirius system for storing and playing all audio and at their consoles they go to a page and there are boxes in color; touch the box and it plays.

Now as for Lotus: In their office, Jeff Schick and a colleague generously spent a few hours giving me a tour of what they can do. I’ll concede: It’s impressive. What impressed me is that IBM integrated the functions of the collaborative, social internet — email, Twitter, wikis, LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook Connect, directories, blogs, calendars, Skype, bookmarks, tagging — in a way that I wish they would all interroperate: click on a name and get everything about them (contact, place, tags, bookmarks); pull together people in calls or calendars just by dragging them; see how people are sharing your documents; see how people are connected….

Only thing is, IBM had to essentially recreate the internet and all these functions to do that, both so they could integrate it all and so that it could operate behind corporate firewalls. We internet snobs make fun of that, but I understand why they do that. But as we talk about how our internet should operate — how open standards for identity, for example, should work — the irony is that we could look at the interlocked IBM platforms to see the promise of it. It’s closed, for a reason, but it shows what an open structure would look like if it operated on truly open standards. I wonder whether there’s an opportunity for IBM to offer these functions at a retail level.

So thanks to Jeff Schick, I got to see Stern’s technology and IBM’s and get onto the show and so I’ll take back my snickers about Notes, most of them.

I finally get into Howard Stern’s studio for the first time and what do we talk about? What else? Small penises. How appropriate.

I was headed in yesterday morning to talk about Lotus Notes vs. Google with Howard’s tech guru, IBM’s Jeff Schick, and get a tour of the studio and its operation. Then Howard invited us in, on the air. We talked geek stuff for a few minutes (more on that later) when Howard asked what I was up to next. I came prepared. I said I was working on a possible book about publicness (new idea) and wanted to talk to him about it. Ask what you have to ask on the air, Howard said. So I asked him whether he had regrets about his public life and about his view that people are better off public. He said he thought his listeners were better off because he was willing to talk about anything, even masturbation and lesbians.

I told Howard that he had cleared the way for me to — even inspired me to — talk about my prostate cancer in public. Howard, of course, cut to the blunt question: “Are you getting it up now?” Answer: no.

We talked about the gory, intimate details of prostate cancer: the strange, “internal” orgasms; the harpoons up the ass for biopsies; the garden hose out of the dick after surgery. The cast groaned at each of these. “You fucking shut me up,” Howard said. I fear I was discouraging men from getting tested when I meant to do the opposite. And Howard acknowledged, as hard as it was, that he, too, would have opted to get the cancer out. Hell, he can’t stand sniffing brass polish on his condo door without thinking he’s getting cancer.

I wish I were funnier and more fun. Over the years, I’ve called into the show about the First Amendment and the FCC, about gadgets and geek stuff, and now about cancer. What a ball of fun I am. Good thing we didn’t talk 9/11.

It was great fun visiting the show. On the air, as a guest, I stood right inside the door, by a wall behind the couch, with a headset and mic on. To my right was Fred and I was delighted the first time he played a sound effect to back up what I was saying. I got Fredded! To my left was Jeff Schick and behind him, behind glass, Robin. Howard sat three-quarters of the way across the studio — quite a distance — in his command center, looking a little gaunt (too much exercise, I’d say), and beyond him was the Wheel of Sex and the Gary puppet and all that.

As soon as the show went to break, folks walked into the studio, Howard chatted a bit, and I left him to his work. Outside the studio. Steve Langford of Howard 100 News held his mic in front of me sucking quotes out with his puppy-dog silences. They take video. They get releases.

And then Jeff and I toured, meeting Scott the Engineer, Sal and RIchard (so polite), the Howard TV folks, and more. The amazingly nice Gary Dell’Abate and I talked gadgets. What impresses me is just how nice these folks are. Makes you want to work there, even with the ball-busting.

LATER: Howard talked about prostate cancer again this morning after having obsessed on it last night: “I was so upset for him. And then of course, it turned to me and I have cancer…. Seems to me that doctors ought to sit down and figure out how to remove prostate cancer without removing a guy’s boner…. Every male on the planet should be donating money to prostate cancer research….

“I just had a bad day with that. Every day seems like a bad day to me because everything drives me nuts.”

Hilarious. Just mention a rumor of Howard Stern replacing Simon Cowell on American Idol and the so-called Parents Television Council rears its head again. Haven’t heard from them in a while — have we? — because they and their coconspirators at the FCC succeeded in making broadcast TV and radio into dull, flavorless tapioca. But getting rid of Stern didn’t help the PTC because they used him to scare their constituency and raise money. And that’s why they’re eagerly chomping into this rumor — spread by Stern himself — even though he has not appeared on broadcast and has not said one four-letter word. Putting out a press release reveals their true motives.

“Given ‘American Idol’s’ extreme popularity with family audiences, I hope that Fox will put the rumors to rest and announce that it has no intention of adding to the show one of the most profane, sexually explicit and anti-family performers in the history of the broadcast medium — either as a guest or as a judge,” PTC President Tim Winter said in a statement Wednesday. “Unless Stern intends to undergo some sort of moth-to-butterfly metamorphosis — though in his case the change would be more like rattlesnake-to-Labrador Retriever — adding him to ‘American Idol’ would spell immediate death for one of the best franchises in American family entertainment.” . . .

“Fox should move immediately to repudiate these rumors and instead commit publicly to keeping ‘American Idol’ safe for family viewing,” Winter said.

For old time’s sake, here’s my exclusive reporting on the lie of FCC indecency fines: how the Parents Television Council manufactured the “uproar” that led to what was then the largest fine in FCC history: only three people bothered to actually write complaints and only a few score bothered to hit the PTC’s complaint machine button. The Parents Television Council speaks for no one but its banker.

: When Howard talked about Ellen Degeneres threatening to quit — oh, please — if he came on, I called into the show this morning.

We just got a glimpse of Howard Stern’s next life, I think. I was running errands today listening to a repeat of the show from this week when I heard Stern talk with a caller about what he could do on the internet. Thanks to my handy Sirius Satellite radio, I was able to – Tivo-like – back and up repeat what he’d just said and I wrote it down:

Tomorrow I could go on the internet and start my own channel with my own subscribers. You’d be able to click and watch us on TV, watch us in the studio live, streaming. You’d be able to listen to us streaming. You’d be able to get us on your iPhone. You’d be able to do everything right at the click of the internet. I wouldn’t even need to work for a company. I’d be my own company… So true it’s ridiculous.

Sounds like more than idle admiration of technology to me. Stern has a year left on his contract on satellite. He’s so valuable to Sirius, they surely will make him an offer it would be hard to refuse. But I suspect that much of his last reported $500 million contract came in stock and that stock is now worth $0.59 (I know all too well, because I own some), so continuing with satellite would still be a gamble. Besides, he has plenty of money and no divorce settlement to pay off (or so it would certainly appear). This week, he was lambasting Rush Limbaugh for ripping off his listeners selling them T-shirt; in response to a question from Gary Dell’Abate, Stern said even an extra $1 million wasn’t worth that. Could he be rationalizing a cut in pay?

On the internet, Stern would get the complete freedom he has long lusted after. He would share his revenue and value with no one but his staff. Now that we can listen to radio over the internet – on our internet-enabled phones – we can listen to him anywhere (is this why he has refused to allow Sirius to put him on the iPhone? I’m still unhappy about that). He would have direct relationships with his fans. He could charge them (and, yes, I would pay for it; he’s why I subscribe to satellite now … see, I am not a pay bigot). He could sell advertising in new ways. Fans could get him anywhere, anytime. If he’s smart – and he is – he could open up enough tidbits to go viral, letting his audience market him for free.

I wrote about Stern as a pioneer in my book. He rethought radio networks and built his own. He brought satellite radio to critical mass. But satellite radio was always a transitional technology, waiting for ubiquitous connectivity that would enable on-demand programming anywhere. (I tried to warn Sirius’ president, Mel Karmazin, here.) Now our phones can give us radio and soon Stern will be ready for them; they will make him portable.

There’s a larger trend at work here: Entertainers (radio, music, comedy, books, columnists, even filmmakers) will have direct relationships with their audiences. Like Stern, they won’t have to work for companies or go through them for distribution. That’s already happening, of course, on the web for creation, distribution, and monetization. That idea is even extending to funding. Look at Kickstarter – a Spot.US for creativity – where your most loyal fans who most want you to make something can fund or invest in it, maybe for nothing more than the privilege of helping you (this is the Wikipedia ethic). It returns to the age of patronage, only now the kings don’t fund the artists, the public does and less money is wasted on middlemen.

Maybe this is all wishful thinking. I’ve been dreading Stern’s retirement (but I think so is he). So I’m hoping that he makes the leap to the next generation and that others will follow his example. Am I reading too much into his conjecture about the internet? If I am, I’ll bet Karmazin is, too.

: Tim Windsor adds in the comments: “Sounds like Howard needs to make a pilgrimage to Leo Laporte’s TWiT Cottage to see how this can be done professionally for surprisingly little money.”

Right. Leo shows it all: how to do live video with chat and also distribute across many platforms.